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Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Labour after Brown?

A thoughtful piece by Andrew Sparrow in today's Guardian on what the Labour Party might look like after Gordon. It focuses on a speech by David Lammy - once dubbed "the Black Blair" by The Sun - which in fact sounded more Cameroonian than Blairite - particularly in its references to the "good society."

On a similar but lighter note, the Daily Pundit blog came up with a hugely entertaining prediction of what David Miliband's first Cabinet might look like, which I have been meaning to link to.

I have a few issues with his choices, mind. The Pundit reckons Prime Minister Miliband would make his brother Ed Foreign Secretary and James Purnell Chancellor. My money would be on Geoff Hoon and John Hutton for those two posts.

Perhaps we're all getting a bit ahead of ourselves. Over on Political Betting, HenryG Manson reckons Gordon Brown is good value at 50-1 to be still leading the party in 2013.

You're being deliberately mischievous David. I have in fact used the term "Cameroon" before to describe a supporter of David Cameron, as have other commentators. It was not a reference to the colour of Mr Lammy's skin or any resemblance he may have to Roger Milla and Co.

Gordon Brown has been appropriated as the butt of the nation’s jokes, its punching-bag and bogeyman. No one (and this seems to extend to the Cabinet) has a good word to say for him and when he does come up everyone has an avalanche of words to bury him in.

My own feelings about Brown are equivocal, but I’m not really sure how much they’re my feelings anymore. Under the pressure of the newspaper leaders and the opinion polls and the water-cooler character assassinations, I find it harder and harder to sustain a positive view of Brown. It as if thinking well of the Prime Minister is a plant that isn’t adapted to survive in this environment. The pressure to go along with the herd and accept the popular wisdom is overwhelming. Social views are contagious; an epidemic of dissatisfaction with the Prime Minister has spread through the population, carried on the radio waves and in the newsprint of the media. I think that’s why so many Labour supporters are despairing. Every time politics is mentioned they hear their convictions about the government controverted. Most just can’t take the psychological pressure that comes with trying to speak up for Brown anymore.

To read more of my views link to my blog, Just who the hell are we?, on wordpress.com:http://adammcnestrie.wordpress.com/

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"He saw politics very much like Trollope, as the interplay of personalities seeking preferment, rather than, like me, as a conflict of principles and programmes about social and economic change."

Denis Healey, writing about Roy Jenkins in "The Time of My Life."

"I'll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with a series of far-fetched resolutions, and these are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code. And you go through the years sticking to that, outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council, a Labour council, hiring taxis to scuttle round the city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers. I'll tell you - and you'll listen - you can't play politics with people's jobs and with people's homes and with people's services."

Neil Kinnock, Bournemouth 1985

"But the most eloquent message concerns the Blair government. It must be right at all times. Above all, the integrity of the leader can never be challenged. He never did hype up intelligence. He didn't take Britain to war on any other than the stated terms. Any suggestion of half-truth, or disguised intention, or concealed Bushite promises is the most disgraceful imaginable charge that deserves a state response that knows no limit.

"That's how a sideshow came to take over national life. Now it seems to have taken a wretched, guiltless man's life with it. Such is the dynamic that can be unleashed by a leader who believes his own reputation to be the core value his country must defend."

Hugo Young, on the death of Dr David Kelly, 2003

"The socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. It's the way I see football, the way I see life."